With Byrd's death, one era of statesmen fades

Tuesday

Jun 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMJun 29, 2010 at 11:07 AM

WASHINGTON - The death of West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the Senate's elder statesman, is the latest in a recent series of vivid reminders that the Senate - and the ways it shapes major policies - is changing fast.

WASHINGTON - The death of West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the Senate's elder statesman, is the latest in a recent series of vivid reminders that the Senate - and the ways it shapes major policies - is changing fast.

Byrd, 92, was one of a handful of senators who made the institution run from the 1970s until the middle of this decade.

Their numbers have diminished strikingly in the last year or so. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who served for 47 years, died 10 months ago. Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, D-Del., became the vice president. Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., is retiring in January.

Byrd, who was the Senate's Democratic leader from 1977 to 1989 and the longest-serving member of Congress in history, helped lead fights to overhaul the nation's tax code, put Social Security on a more solvent path, create budget surpluses in the late 1990s and oppose the war in Iraq.

His passing also represents the further fading of lawmakers - a class that includes the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., and the late Democratic Gov. George Wallace of Alabama - who were staunch segregationists but changed their views later in their careers.

"You've had a slow diminution of old-Southern senators, the die-hard segregationists who fought the Lyndon Johnson civil-rights legislation only to have a conversion," said Ronald Walters, a retired University of Maryland political science professor. "The old gang of Southern Democrats - he (Byrd) is the last of them."

Byrd, Kennedy, Thurmond, Biden and Dodd represent the breed of legislators from a pre-YouTube, 24-hour news cycle era that reached across the aisle to get things done.

"People who came up in that era worked very differently. They relied very much on personal relationships," said Andrew Taylor, a congressional scholar at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "You don't have those kinds of bridge-builders now like you did then."